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Showing posts from May, 2006

S-Nat and XML transactions

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As we're getting our new hosting platform in place, we've noticed a few issues popping up. The first larger issue was PayFlowPro from Verisign and their lack of support for 64 bit operating systems. That was easily worked around, but the next issue has me perplexed. The load balancers we're using work as NAT devices (Network Address Translation), so we have a private network behind them with all of our servers attached and the public network on the other side of them. All traffic to/from our servers goes through the load balancers, making for a firewall. To allow the web servers to talk to sites they want to visit (or request services and information from), NAT is used to allow for the public address of the load balancers to be used in the request to the servers on the other end. This works well for most things I've tried. OS updates install just fine (rather quickly over the large pipes our data center has, I might add). Payment related data works just fine (or at leas

Creating JPG images from PDF's using Perl and ImageMagick

One of the things that has always bugged me is the excessive bandwidth that PDF's use when presenting schematics. We also have a fair number of users that aren't computer literate enough to understand what Acrobat Reader is, although this seems to be less of an issue lately. Many of our vendors only supply PDF's, and with the 1000's and 1000's of schematics we have it's just not a good option to manually manipulate each one. Enter ImageMagick. ImageMagick ImageMagick is available for many languages, but I prefer using Perl to manipulate the images. Most of the concepts will be the same regardless of language, even if the syntax is changed. So, to begin, I'll include the module and assign the path I want to convert files from. I've also bolded any items you may want to change for your implementation in all of the code snippets below. #!/usr/bin/perl use Image::Magick; use IO::Dir; my $path = [path to images] ; tie %dir, IO::Dir, $path; At this point, we&#